Taylor Swift Lists Her Relationship ‘Red Flags’

To add to her endless list of mind-boggling career accomplishments, Taylor Swift is the first-ever country artist to appear on the cover of Vogue magazine. Wearing a floppy hat over her shiny, stick-straight locks, the 22-year-old graces the February issue's exterior with her natural beauty and its interior with her down-home charm. In an article titled 'Taylor Swift: The Single Life,' the multi-Grammy-winning superstar opens up about everything from her childhood summers at the Jersey Shore (not where the racy reality show is filmed, but rather a "cute little harbor town") to her planning meetings for 2013 ... already!

Currently hard at work on her fourth studio album, Taylor is once again wearing her heart on her musical sleeve. "There's just been this earth-shattering, not recent, but absolute crash-and-burn heartbreak, and that will turn out to be what the next album is about," the singer-songwriter reveals to Vogue. "The only way that I can feel better about myself -- pull myself out of that awful pain of losing someone -- is writing songs about it to get some sort of clarity."

%VIRTUAL-MultiGallery-144917|143485|142922%She'll have to rely on past heartache for musical inspiration these days, as Taylor insists she's happily single. "I got nothing going on!" she says. "I just don't really feel like dating. I really have this great life right now."

When she does start to feel like dating again, Taylor is armed with some great life lessons, some of which she's learned the hard way. "I have red flags now," she says, listing four of those "flags" for Vogue. Take note, gentlemen:

1. "If someone doesn't seem to want to get to know me as a person but instead seems to have kind of bought into the whole idea of me and he approves of my Wikipedia page? And falls in love based on zero hours spent with me? That's maybe something to be aware of. That will fade fast. You can't be in love with a Google search."

2. "If a dude is threatened by the fact that I need security, if they make me feel like I am some sort of princessy diva -- that's a bad sign. I don't have security to make myself look cool, or like I have an entourage. I have security because there's a file of stalkers who want to take me home and chain me to a pipe in their basement."

3. "If you need to put me down a lot in order to level the playing field or something? If you are threatened by some part of what I do and want to cut me down to size in order to make it even? That won't work either."

4. "Also, I can't deal with someone who's obsessed with privacy. People kind of care if there are two famous people dating. But no one cares that much. If you care about privacy to the point where we need to dig a tunnel under this restaurant so that we can leave? I can't do that."

Other highlights of the insightful Vogue article include Taylor's memories of her "awkward" junior high school years and how she finally learned to stop worrying about what was cool. She also talks about how her parents' opposite personalities help balance out her own life, and how she always tries to be self-aware, despite all of her record-breaking achievements. So while walking out on stage in front of 65,000 people may not intimidate the multi-platinum-selling superstar, the reality of it often brings her to tears.

"This is what I've wanted to do my whole life," says Taylor. "It never freaks me out. Never ... But you know what does freak me out? When is the other shoe going to drop? I am so happy right now. So I am always living in fear. This can't be real, right? This can't really be my life."

Read the full Vogue article here.

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